Humanism with a human face?

Rather than write a grandiloquent essay on the topic "What Is Humanism?," I'll proceed in a less systematic way. Had I but world enough and time, each of the following subjects would deserve its own essay. At least their selection and order are not random. Here I will also make my general agreement with Rick Szykowny's editorial in the September/October 1994 Humanist explicit. In particular, he argued that "contemporary humanism has lost its aesthetics ... leaving it without a vocabulary to engage the rest of the culture" and that "humanism has no real activist impulse."

Easy to quibble and note exception, al individuals who achieve an integrated existence! But as a critical and corrective assessment of organized humanism, those statements stand. The problem goes much deeper than a mere reform of any particular group such as the American Humanist Association. A strong faction among humanists disdains all philosophy as obscurantism and settles for positivist cheerleading. A dogmatic equal sign is placed between science and democracy--an equation based much more upon faith than reason. In this equation, the arts are often tolerated on the margins of culture, with the understanding that artists are akin to children, "savages" and crazy folks. (A kinship I wouldn't disown or disdain, if only in solidarity.) And the faith and rites of the great majority of humankind are reduced to anthropological curiosities.

As a gay man endangered by the religious right, I will put up a fight against real enemies. But I am often repelled by the class arrogance of folks who should be my allies--because what I detect in much humanist rhetoric is not so much a defense of reason as a defensive sniping at the barbarian hordes from within a stifling sectarian bunker. The more hermetic humanists do not even extend the courtesy of real human contact to our opponents! --even if this should involve a shouting match across barricades. Some humanists may object at just this point: "That kind of activism reduces people to an equal level of barbarism." I am willing to argue that point, though not in detail at this time. For now I would only suggest that the cult of rationality is not always reason, able and can become a retreat from worldly responsibility. Are you willing to save your own soul and lose the world? Humanism in this pure distillation becomes inhumane. The impurity of politics is not improved by a purist humanism.

I make no secret of my own conviction that humanism should evolve in the direction of democratic socialism. So my relations with a Catholic nun who serves the poor will be much more comradely than with any ruling-class secular humanist. In this respect, the right is often right: one version of secular humanism is, indeed, the de facto faith of many citizens, including those who hold great power and wealth. What the religious right is reluctant to acknowledge, however, is that the crudest kind of egoism and social Darwinism often covers itself with holy water and incense. There are true believers who disdain any such disguise and openly proclaim the doctrinal unity of Ego, Reason, and Capital. But whether in religious garb or atheist nudity, the humanism of the status quo should be open to question precisely among humanists. And this question often gains greatest resonance in the arts and in the more anarchic and critical forms of popular culture.

Recently I was reading Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, which he favored above Faust among his own poetic works and which blends burgherly conservatism, romantic striving, and an Enlightenment spirit. Dorothea is a refugee from the French Revolution, in which her former fiancee was active, though "prison and death were his for, tune." His parting words are, in turn, recited by Dorothea to Hermann, her new suitor of solid German peasant stock, in a passage which reflects the poet's own ambivalence, his own making and breaking of forms: "Gold and silver are melted out of the ancient and holy/Patterns: everything is in motion; the world we had fashioned/Seems to desire dissolution in night and in chaos; it craves a/New birth."

Reading this passage in full, I realized that the theme is transformed in The Communist Manifesto--which cannot be accidental, since Marx had a thorough education in humanist and German classics and wrote a few youthful poems of his own:

Constant revolutionizing of production,

uninterrupted disturbance

of all social conditions, everlasting

uncertainty and agitation

distinguish the bourgeois epoch

from all earlier ones. All fixed,

fast-frozen relations, with their

train of ancient and venerable

prejudices and opinions, are swept

away, all new-formed ones become

antiquated before they can

ossify. All that is solid melts into

air, all that is holy is profaned, and

man is at last compered to face

with sober senses his real conditions

of life, and his relations with

his kind.

Goethe gives Hermann the last words in the poem, a resounding--perhaps foolhardy?--resolution to all contradictions: "Germans should never desire to continue this terrible movement,/Nor is it fitting to waver this way and that./This land is ours!" Nor does Goethe omit a rallying cry "for God and for law, for parents and wives and/ Children. . . "True, the martial spirit in this final passage is defensive rather than imperialist; it's not fair to sniff out incipient fascism here. Yet the elements of Volkisch reaction are present even in the early German nationalism of a great poet and humanist. (Goethe believed in the God of Spinoza, but Hermantis God was good enough for the masses and for law and order.) In the wake of collapsing communist regimes, the shout of capitalism triumphant filled talk shows and think tanks, and the dogma proclaimed was similar: history must stop here.

In my column "Capitalism with a Human Face?" (Humanist, May/June 1994), I ventured to hope that Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human-rights activist who became Czechoslovakia's first head of state after communism, would exert "at least a. moderating influence upon his fellow politicians and capitalists' " Under communism, Havel espoused democratic socialism. Today he is a multimillionaire content with "the free market ... the only natural economy," which, in turn, reflects the free and multiform "miracle of being."

On July 4 of this year, Mayor Edward Rendell awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal to Havel during a ceremony at Independence Hall. The metaphysician and the politician in Havel joined together to deliver this message:

The relationship to the world that

modern science fostered and

shaped now appears to have exhausted

its potential.... It is

now more of a source of disintegration

and doubt than a source

of integration and meaning....

Yes, the only real hope of people

today is probably a renewal of our

certainty that we are rooted in

the Earth and, at the same time,

the cosmos.

In one of his essays, Havel quotes Heidegger with approval: "Only a God can save us now." For a time, Heidegger found God in Hitler. I don't discount either writer across the board, and I share Havel's concern with bridging ultimate and relative values, but he would do more good if he would preach his current creed directly to the Thatcherite faction directing the Czech economy. There is little justice or mercy in their program, and they continue the degradation of earth, air, and water which was common policy under the communist regime.

In the abstract, Havel's message is often decent. But if we dig a little to discover just how the current Czech regime is "rooted in the earth," we find that Havel increasingly plays the role of moral fig leaf for nakedly rapacious "free market" forces, both national and inter, national. No wonder he has received an uncritical chorus of acclaim from our own rulers and pundits. Politics is not only the art of compromise, and Havel will soon destroy even his integrity as a common citizen and writer if he continues preaching cosmic banalities.

Among existentialist writers and thinkers, Karl Jaspers is something of a square. Compared with Sartre, for example, he has a much more pedestrian style, has many fewer "bright ideas," and was less politically engaged--but wiser as a public citizen. Among many post-modernist academics and thinkers, he is unread or out of fashion because he is only a relative, rather than an absolute, relativist. If that formulation seems cryptic, read him. My own introduction to his work came through Hannah Arendt's essay in her book Men in Dark Times. His work is a humanist challenge even to certain humanist certainties.

Over the course of a profound and long-lasting friendship, Arendt and Jaspers exchanged many letters, and a selection was published in 1992 under the title Correspondence: 1926-1969. On October 19, 1946, Jaspers wrote to Arendt concerning his own skepticism "about the `demonic' element in Hitler" and in the Nazi regime:

It seems to me that we have to see

these things in their total banality,

in their prosaic triviality, be,

cause that's what truly characterizes

them. Bacteria can cause

epidemics that wipe out nations,

but they remain merely bacteria.

I regard any hint of myth and

legend with horror, and every,

thing unspecific is just such a hint.

This was only one precursor of Arendt's own developed argument about "the banality of evil" in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which a wealth of specifics about bureaucracy and mass murder are linked in a masterful way. That thesis may not be entirely persuasive--banality is only one aspect of evil--but it was a useful corrective against obscurantism (and caused a storm of controversy).

Jaspers could be inconsistent about mythology. In regard to evil, he may have resisted acknowledging the devil. But in regard to the search for good (sometimes personified as God), he was more liberal in defending the value of symbols, parables, and myths "as legit' mate modes of existential insight." In, deed, he argued against the "demythologizing" theology of Rudolf Bultmann, which he regarded as a reductive--and unreasonable--form of rationalism. A sentence which illuminates (without explaining away) this inconsistency can be found in a collection of Arendt's work, Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, published this year:

He has, as it were, mapped the

paths on which modern philosophizing 

has to travel if it does not

want to end up in the blind alleys

of a positivistic or a nihilistic 

fanaticism.

Tikkun is a Hebrew word meaning (in the definition given by the Jewish magazine of the same name) "to mend, repair, and transform the world." The editor of Tikkun, Michael Lerner, considers himself a progressive. He aims to reconcile religious faith with a liberal agenda, a project I might also endorse in the spirit of solidarity--if such solidarity were not so thoroughly sabotaged by Lerner, among others. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when the religious right made anti-gay crusades a centerpiece of "family values," Lerner was busy rallying "pro-family" folks on the left as a counterbalance. In 1982, Lerner published "Recapturing the Family Issue"' in the Nation and proposed a "progressive" Family Bill of Rights. Lerner said not one word about gay rights. In this country at that time (and much more so now), this evasion regarding rampant anti-gay bigotry resembled a similar evasiveness on the part of some German liberals and leftists in regard to anti-Semitism during the ascendance of the National Socialist movement. No simple equation is implied in this analogy; totalitarianism surely changes forms and features over time.

Heterosexism is no accidental feature of far-right "family values." It is a central motive force, in fact, within the Christian right--a movement rapidly gaining power within the Republican Party. (Ollie North in Virginia and Jeb Bush in Florida campaigned with a program borrowed largely from the Christian Coalition.) When confronted by such realities, especially by gay people, Lerner has responded with magnanimous rhetoric, with cheerful entreaties to join the family.

Join the family? On whose terms? The question is answered by Reuven Kimelman in "Homosexuality and Family, Centered Judaism," an article published in the July/August issue of Tikkun. In brief, Kimelman argues that the sanctity of scripture and family is violated when religious and secular authorities fail to mark clear boundaries between human relationships which are "normative" and others which are merely tolerable. These boundaries, Kimelman asserts, must be maintained in public policy no less than in the synagogue. Though he does not detail such policy explicitly, in social principle (if not in very faith) Kimelman shares much common ground with the Christian Coalition. He even uses the "slippery slope" argument--a little sodomy goes a long way toward moral chaos. Kimelman suggests that he is "opposed to any infringement of the private rights of the homosexual." The homosexual? This already achieves a degree of dehumanization, just as anti-Semites might speak of "the Jew." We have news for "progressives" of this kind: heterosexism is regressive in every respect.

In the same issue of Tikkun, "Yaakov Levado"--a pseudonym for a gay Orthodox rabbi--responds to Kimelman by making several decent, if predictable, defenses of gay kinship and ordinariness. Predictably, too, he distances himself from "promiscuity, political correctness, and exhibitionism"--words full of sound and fury today, signifying nothing with, out careful qualification. Certainly, "Levado" is innocent of any exhibitionism, pleading for assimilation from behind a closet door. For many gay folks like himself, "the right to privacy" amounts to an enforced secrecy. If exhibitionism means claiming an equal right to the public world, then so be it.

"Yaakov Levado," how will you argue for equality as a disembodied voice? You must also step out into the full light of day and stand your ground among bigots, some of whom are even Jewish "progressives." This may be fearful, but then you would also stand in public among friends and comrades. Or do you place some specious heroic value on isolation? Your pseudonym--Levado--means "He who is alone" in Hebrew, but solitude gains in meaning when all citizens can move and choose freely between public and private life. Presently, folks like Kimelman "own" the public world and are quite content with your privacy; they will receive your muffled message, extend their sympathy, and nail another plank across your closet door. Take to heart the words of Moritz Goldstein, a German Jew writing in 1912:

It is easy to show the absurdity

of our adversaries' arguments and

prove that their enmity is unfounded

What would be gained

by this? That their hatred is genuine.

When all calumnies have been

refuted, all distortions rectified, all

false judgments about us rejected,

antipathy will remain as something

irrefutable. Anyone who

does not realize this is beyond

help.

I'm writing this column in mid-September, so by the time of publication the Stonewall Exhibit at the New York City Public Library will be over. Last weekend, my lover and I stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel (previously the site of one of Robert Ingersoll's homes, according to the plaque on the corner), and we joined friends to attend the exhibit, which commemorates the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969 and documents the 25 years of lesbian and gay struggle which followed.

The cops who raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, expected the event to be routine: round `em up and jail `em. But as the police captain in charge testified later, the queers were no longer "submissive" Having turned the tables on the cops and trapped them in the bar, the drag queens and other queers ripped a parking meter from the pavement and used it as a battering ram. There had, in fact, been previous resistance to police abuse--mostly through polite protest and legal challenges. But the Stonewall Rebellion was the most sustained and serious fight, spanning five nights; it became the catalyst and marker of a new militancy.

Among the old photos of friends and lovers, the leaflets, banners, and documents of the movement, it was fitting to find the Bible (open to Leviticus) and various textbooks of psychology and sexology which had progressed beyond abomination of sin, recommending "scientific" and "humanitarian" treatments instead. In the gift shop there was also an exhibit of Robert Warner's boxed assemblages, including one inscribed with these two quotes:

There's a lot of talk these days

about homosexuals coming out of

the closet. I didn't know they'd

been in the closet. I do know

they've always been in the gutter.

--the Reverend Jerry Falwell

We are all in the gutter, but some

of us are looking at the stars.

--Oscar Wilde

Many readers will know Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest, or his poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"; some may even know his fairy tales (too overcooked to be as good as the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen). Fewer will know his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," a utopian classic which still has the power to move and enlighten, irk and infuriate folks of all sexual and political persuasions. Highly recommended.

Scott Tucker is an artist, activist, and writer, as well as a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP.